Many development and modeling environments, such as business and policy modeling, software development tools and rules management systems require users to choose data elements to be used in a certain circumstance, from a variety of data elements. These data elements may be selected to be used for different purposes. For example, they may be used within forms with predefined fields to fill-in, as a component within an expression in conditional phrases and so forth.
Each data element may be a discrete data item, a property (or a field) of a complex data entity, or an entire data entity. Any element comprises the element properties which describe the qualitative aspects thereof and element values which relate to the quantitative aspects thereof. The term “element” relates both to the name or another descriptor of the property as shown in the tree and to its underlying value that will be used when this name or descriptor is selected.
Data elements used by a system may originate from different sources including data available locally in the runtime environment, data retrieved from storage, from data base or a calculation that include any data element or elements retrieved from any of the aforementioned data sources
The list of available and applicable data element and data entities at a specific point (referred to collectively as “the context”) where they are used varies and depends on the nature and type of these data elements.
Some presently available environments present the user with all possible data elements. However, none of these tools take into account the specific context of use, and the relationship between the various data elements.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an environment that provides a user with a convenient hierarchical representation of the data entities and elements wherein the relationship representation reflects the relation between the data elements and changes in accordance with the specific context of use.